The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  “Where is your zeal to religion and the sanctity of Islam?” Omar asked the prince quietly. “Are you sent by your country or by the Americans?”

  As a generous benefactor of Islamic causes the world over and a well-practiced interlocutor, the prince was not used to being called out, and according to the Mauritanian, who witnessed the scene, he exploded. The Mauritanian recalled how Turki stamped all over the feast that had been laid out in his honor on the floor, knocking over teacups. “Do you want me to deliver a believer to an unbeliever?” asked Mullah Omar quietly.22

  In 1999, Grenier had tried again after the ISI chief before General Ahmed clawed a potential jewel out of the Kandahari mud by securing the tentative blessing of Mullah Omar to abduct Osama from Afghanistan.23 Many Afghanis had died when U.S cruise missiles had rained down on his country as a result of the U.S. embassy attacks and he made it clear that he would not stand in the way if the ISI deployed ninety retired Pakistani commandos to seize Osama at Tarnak Qila.

  However, in October 1999, shortly before the plan could be actioned, the malleable civilian government of Pakistan was toppled by army chief General Pervez Musharraf, a putsch that saw the Western-leaning ISI chief (who was running the Osama kidnapping operation) slung in jail and replaced by zealot General Mahmud Ahmed. A portcullis dropped on ISI–CIA relations. Overnight, Grenier’s “in” ran out, as Peshawar-born Ahmed, who distrusted the Americans for their “on-off” support of Pakistan during and after the Soviet war of the 1980s, shuttered Aabpara against foreigners. It would be three months before Grenier was even allowed back inside the building, and when he did get an invitation, his recommendation to revive the plan deploying former commandos to nab Osama was mocked by Ahmed, who told him: “In my experience those who are retired are tired.”24

  Ahmed was strong-armed by pragmatist Musharraf into visiting Washington soon after, but irreparable damage had been done. After U.S officials ruffled his feathers by accusing him of supporting Al Qaeda and being “in bed with those who threaten us,” the affronted ISI chief, who despised what he considered to be America’s lack of a fingertip-feel for Pakistan, had returned home telling friends that he was “born again as a Muslim.” An exasperated Grenier wrote strongly worded cables back to CIA headquarters, asking them to back off: “The new guy’s not pro Al Qaeda. He’s pro-Taliban.” One was a terrorist outfit, while the other, the Pakistan Army chiefs based in Rawalpindi liked to believe, offered them strategic depth.

  Langley ignored Grenier’s advice and set out to track Osama without Pakistan’s help. In September 2000, the first unarmed Predator drone flew over Afghanistan and within days it had captured real-time footage of the Al Qaeda leader walking around Tarnak Qila, encircled by guards.25

  Pictures seduced generals at the Pentagon, Grenier thought. They seemed to offer the prospect of risk-free rapid victories. But overheard conversations and fuzzy photographs were useless unless they guided some kind of physical force, deniable or otherwise, able to target Osama on the ground.

  In an attempt to restore relations with the ISI, in August 2001 Grenier had helped to bring a U.S. congressional delegation to Islamabad to meet General Musharraf and spy chief General Ahmed. The meetings had gone badly.

  Now that 9/11 was under way and Ahmed was trapped in Washington as all flights in and out of the country were grounded, Grenier hoped U.S officials were making best use of his enforced presence.

  Sitting in the dark watching news reports of the attacks in the United States on his TV, he called ISI analysis chief General Javed Alam Khan, one vulture circling another.

  “It’s going to be a long night,” Grenier said.

  Khan grunted. His brother-in-law and family were still missing in New York. “How could one chap sitting in an Afghan cave be commanding things all over the world?” he muttered disingenuously.

  Grenier resisted the bait.

  September 11, 2001, 7:15 P.M., Karachi, Pakistan

  General Pervez Musharraf was inspecting the well-tended gardens of Mazar-e-Quaid, the Moorish-style mausoleum for Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, when his military secretary informed him of the news from the United States. His thoughts turned immediately to the World Trade Center attack of 1993. He grimaced as he recalled how that plot had led back to Islamabad, where mastermind Ramzi Yousef was run to ground, the arrest implying a link between Pakistan and the first World Trade Center attack.26

  Having recently appointed himself Pakistan’s president and head of state, Musharraf could not afford a repeat of the 1993 debacle. But rather than deal with the situation immediately, he zoned out the news and barreled into a scheduled meeting at his fortified bungalow in the exclusive Zamzama district of Karachi.

  His staff officers, who were watching TV in a side room, tried to interrupt. But Musharraf made it clear that he should not be disturbed, so they loitered outside until both towers collapsed in New York, at which point his military secretary entered the room and started fiddling with the general’s TV set. “What’s the urgency?” Musharraf bridled.

  “Please! Watch, sir,” the officer said.

  Musharraf felt queasy. “America is going to react violently,” he muttered. If the perpetrator of these attacks turned out to be Al Qaeda, which had been allowed to traverse Pakistan for more than a decade, the United States would come straight down the middle lane looking for a strike.

  But that was only a first impression. He made a quick back-of-the-cigarette-packet calculation.27 This appalling tragedy could be an opportunity for a cool strategist who two years earlier had brought his country to the brink of nuclear war with India, when it suited, only to let tensions die back again.

  In a region that was always underpinned by uncertainty, Pakistan could once again become a staging post, as it had been in the 1980s, for the funds, munitions, and matériel imported by the West, Musharraf reasoned. Throughout the 1990s, the United States had snubbed the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in favor of trade deals with India, shuttering defense spending and throttling diplomatic ties. There had been times when Islamabad had felt like Pyongyang, he told himself. But now that America had been attacked on its own soil, the possibilities were legion. He could also use this momentous day to choke thorny elements within his own military and intelligence apparatus—especially the radicals and career Islamists who ran the secret beehive of jihad from the ISI’s strategic S-Wing.28

  Musharraf considered his vulnerabilities.29 There were so many; but among his inner circle of advisers the weakest link was his ISI chief, General Mahmud Ahmed, whose religious conservatism the army had once actively encouraged but given what was unfolding in the United States now seemed out of step.

  “Get Mahmud on the phone,” Musharraf shouted.

  “Everyone is already looking for him,” came the reply.

  When the general finally called in, Musharraf asked him to listen, and say nothing. There was no such thing as a secure line in Pakistan. “Don’t argue with them,” he instructed. “Offer condolences. They need to hear that they have our unqualified support.”

  Replacing the handset, Musharraf ordered a stiff whiskey. He saw his staff eyeing each other. He was happy to appear blasé. He had learned the trick from the man he had deposed as prime minister—Nawaz Sharif—who dealt with every crisis by ordering a large bowl of nihari (beef stew) to chow down on, using the time to think through his options. Musharraf quaffed as he calculated: a staging post, more F16s, billions of dollars in assistance, a purge inside the army’s general headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi and at Aabpara. Out of a heinous and unimaginable act of terror would come pure gold.30

  September 11, 2001, 7:45 P.M., Tariq Road, Karachi

  Three miles away as the crow flies, in a popular Karachi shopping district where traders arranged their carts of chappels (slippers) into peacock plumes and Anil’s and Miss Fashion vied with the Shalimar Centre arcade for customers, “Mokhtar” glowed like a well-fanned fire. He just could not stop smiling as he soaked up p
raise from the throng gathered around him.31

  Mokhtar—a kunya (nom de guerre) that he had selected as it meant “the chosen one”—had first turned up in Osama’s Tora Bora in 1996 with what seemed at the time to be a crazy plan: turning commercial passenger jets into flying bombs. But while Al Qaeda old hands scoffed, Osama was entranced: Mokhtar was a breath of fresh air for a visionary but disorganized jihad leader who spent his days surrounded by blunt-knuckled and illiterate Yemenis armed with sickle-shaped Hadrami daggers, their waists cinched by explosives belts. Mokhtar talked of how the plot would finish what his nephew Ramzi Yousef had attempted in 1993 and how the atrocities would play out on TV for weeks after and make Osama famous. Combining spectacular violence with modern communications was potentially the most powerful weapon of all.

  But Mokhtar’s scheme was unworkable, as he wanted $500,000 to get it started and Osama did not have any cash.

  Then, in October 1999, after an EgyptAir plane was downed over the Atlantic Ocean by the first officer, who had put the plane into a deliberate spin when the captain left the cockpit to use the toilet, Osama began thinking about Mokhtar’s plot again. Media reports reveled in how the last sounds recorded by the black box voice recorder of the doomed EgyptAir plane were of the first officer repeating, “I rely on Allah,” making this potentially mass murder by Koranic diktat. It was that simple, Mokhtar had told Osama. Al Qaeda would become the most notorious jihad outfit in the world if it could pull off something similar.

  Osama was hooked and over the next eighteen months spent increasing amounts of time with Mokhtar, planning a secret off-the-books operation in meetings from which the Al Qaeda shura was excluded—an extraordinary departure for an organization that was otherwise run with the fastidious inclusiveness of an S corp. The old guard, who mostly doubted the plan, mistrusted Mokhtar, who refused to swear bayat (allegiance) to Osama or pay them any respect. Only Abu Hafs al-Masri, Osama’s deputy, and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, were brought into the operational planning.

  To keep things tight, Mokhtar moved the operational base down to Karachi, hiring the Tariq Road apartment and putting it in the hands of two ethnic Burmese brothers, both reformed alcoholics brought up in Saudi Arabia. So many people passed through the safe house that neighbors suspected it was a brothel, or perhaps just another hawala center, where foreign laborers could deposit cash for gold to be sent invisibly to family members overseas.

  Now as he watched the fruits of his labors, Mokhtar called for takeout from the local branch of Dunkin’ Donuts and toasted Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a buck-toothed Yemeni who had been earmarked as a potential hijacker but had to settle for plot coordinator after failing to gain entry to the United States. He had collected bin al-Shibh off a bus from Quetta that morning. Later, they had driven to the airport to fetch Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, a mobile phone salesman from Jeddah, who had supervised the hijackers’ finances. Ammar al-Balochi, Mokhtar’s nephew, who had hosted some of the hijackers in Dubai, also dropped by, accompanied by a one-legged Yemeni thug they all called Silver, who had sent Western Union funds to pay flight school bills in small college towns.

  Crowded around the TV set, watching reruns of United 175 hurtling toward the World Trade Center, they chanted: “God … aim … aim … aim.”

  Only after the Twin Towers actually collapsed did Mokhtar momentarily look panicked.

  “Shit,” he said, whistling. “I think we bit off more than we could chew.”32

  September 11, 2001, 9 P.M., Kandahar

  Mahfouz the Mauritanian was conflicted. He felt remorse, but the giddy jubilation coursing through Kandahar’s crowded lanes was infectious. Even though he had voted it down, his ruling running to a dozen pages, the scale of the attack was dazzling, something none of them had believed could ever happen. Like many others who had been on the scene for years, he knew that everyone would have to rally around Osama now.33

  Growing up as a naïve, religious student in Nouakchott, Mauritania, he had been drawn to Afghanistan after reading a copy of Al Jihad, a magazine published by Osama bin Laden and his mentor, a radical Palestinian cleric called Abdullah Azzam.34 In 1988 they had cofounded Al Qaeda and, electrified by talk of a fight that could unite all Muslims and make them proud, Mahfouz had siphoned off his college fees and bought a plane ticket to Pakistan. Eventually, he had found his way to Al Qaeda’s secretive Al Farouk training camp, located in Afghanistan near Khost. But he had learned pretty quickly that he was not cut out for war.

  Al Farouk was, according to Osama’s dour Egyptian adviser Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a “den of garrisoned lions.” Mahfouz, a slight, bookish figure, struggled to complete the basic training. He had been thinking of leaving until the morning Osama arrived to address them. Mesmerized by this handsome, tall, and soldierly Saudi heir, he also had been entranced by Osama’s story of having abandoned a life of plenty to defend persecuted brothers and sisters who had nothing.35

  Now, the Mauritanian was brought back to the present by the chants of “Allahu Akhbar!” filling the air. Some in Kandahar were in tears and kissing the ground. Others seemed struck dumb.

  “Happiness was not [the right word for it],” wrote the Mauritanian’s friend Abu Zubaydah, who also witnessed the scenes and wrote about them later in his diary. An ethnic Palestinian, Zubaydah had been born in Saudi Arabia, so he was technically stateless. After rejecting his conservative middle-class parents, who wanted him to train as a doctor, he had ended up in Afghanistan, training with Al Qaeda recruits around the same time Mahfouz arrived. After being injured in battle in 1991, he had struck out on his own as a freelance logistics man for the jihad. Operating out of Peshawar, he organized identity and travel documents for new recruits and collected donations. He had shifted to Kandahar in June 2001.

  Zubaydah would later claim (and many supported him) that he had not known in advance about the Planes Operation. But like everyone else, he was overcome by the enormity of the event and scale of an old enemy’s defeat. “Lambs were slaughtered, juice and sweets were distributed …” he reported. “We were in a state of elation that God only knows.”36

  By ten P.M., hundreds had converged on Al Qaeda’s media center—a ramshackle building where the city’s only legal television set was located. Faces pressed up against windows. The Mauritanian, who was among them, saw several Taliban ministers, in their black turbans, furtively darting in to snatch glimpses of the scenes broadcasting from New York until a team of technically minded brothers was given permission to splice into the feed so another screen could be erected in a street where previously all privately owned sets had been smashed.

  It was not long before conspiracy theories started to circulate. The Jews had done it, or the CIA. When someone recognized the Mauritanian, they asked for his opinion. “Israel is behind this, right?”

  He shrugged, not sure of how to react.

  “The U.S. will take extreme revenge,” predicted an Afghan brother.

  “They will pound Afghanistan into the dust,” worried another, glancing to the sky.

  The Mauritanian interrupted them. “Let’s worry about that tomorrow,” he said.37

  September 11, 2001, 11:30 P.M., Kabul, Afghanistan

  Kuwaiti preacher Sulaiman Abu Ghaith sat alone in his lodgings, listening to the radio and fiddling with his gold wedding ring, the only conspicuous thing about him. Stout, soft-spoken, and not prone to the declamatory style of sermonizing loved by many jihad-espousing scholars, he was young, serious, and devout, and he had ended up in Afghanistan almost by mistake.

  Listening to the gunfire and shrieks outside his window, he wished he were back home in Kuwait City, where his wife, Fatima, and six daughters would soon be arriving. He had spent the last three days getting them out of Afghanistan, using as an excuse the fact that Fatima was suffering complications with her seventh pregnancy. Anyone who had an inkling of humanity would have done the same, he reasoned. If he thought he could have got away with it, he would not have returned.r />
  Normally at this hour he would have been writing or reading. But right now, Abu Ghaith listened to news of the spewing chaos in America with a sense of mounting dread.

  Glancing at his watch, he saw it was midnight. He wondered if his wife had made it to the hospital.

  Bam, bam, bam.

  A knocking at the door. In Kabul, callers this late could be assassins hired by warlords. He pulled the door open an inch, jamming his foot against it, and saw a bearded figure. Pushing on the door, the man introduced himself as Sheikh Osama’s courier.38

  Abu Ghaith felt his blood drain. He had come to Afghanistan in June, invited by the Mauritanian to lecture at the House of the Pomegranates. Both men believed deeply in the idea of jihad as a force of awakening for the Muslim ummah (community). But it was not the physical fight they invested in, rather an embracing of the struggle, an energetic yearning for knowledge and a recommitment to replicating the holy life of the Prophet. Abu Ghaith’s association with the Mauritanian had put him, sporadically, in the company of Osama, who was casting around for new religious advisers. Osama persuaded Abu Ghaith to swear “a small bayat,” which committed him to “do anything he could within his capabilities to help Al Qaeda’s emir”—but only as a religious scholar and orator.

  Abu Ghaith had been compelled to give a few speeches at Tarnak Qila, and he had lectured on jurisprudence in a training camp.39 Like everyone else in Afghanistan, he had picked up rumors that a big operation was coming, but he had no idea what it was. Now that his oath was being called in at a critical moment for Al Qaeda he could not believe how stupid he had been.

  Trembling, he dressed in a smart, chocolate brown shalwar kameez. What plans did the Sheikh have for him, he wondered as he was driven through the night, in silence, and toward Khost. When they reached the Sulaiman foothills, their vehicle began climbing into the high mountains. Finally, they reached the mouth of a cave, where he recognized a silhouette.